It's Wednesday, you deserve a treat, like an episode of the Hell Gate Podcast! Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado jumped into the governor's race last June, the timing, at the very least, felt right, and there were some signs that Kathy Hochul was vulnerable to a challenge.
A Siena poll from a few weeks earlier in May found that New York voters had a negative favorability rating of Governor Kathy Hochul, and that 55 percent of voters would prefer to have "someone else" be governor. (Another sign of the times in that poll? Forty-five percent of voters believed that New Yorkers should "support the federal government’s efforts to deport illegal migrants living illegally in New York," as opposed to only 38 percent who opposed it.)
Since June, of course, much has changed, especially the electoral fortunes of Hochul, who ran her first campaign for a full term for governor so poorly that she almost lost to Long Island MAGA guy Lee Zeldin.